Here's a cyberpunk revenge plot, and it's a family tale to boot. "[A] top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter's computer to monitor her Internet usage." Which sounds wrong in all kinds of ways.
Next:
one of the daughter's friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad's personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany's federal police.
Revenge! And a mild Gothic touch, if you see parent and/or state as tyrannical.
It went on:
The hackers got into the servers for the "Patras" program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.
That sense of ever-expanding power might remind us of Frankenstein's monster's threat to succeed humanity, or Dracula's viral promise.
Here's a quietly threatening moral:
One moral of the tale: parents, think hard before taking technical measures against your own kids. There's a better than average chance that they—or their friends—know more than you do.
(thanks to Todd Bryant)
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